The lenses of cameras used in intersection and roadway monitoring systems must be cleaned periodically in order to prevent dirt and other debris from settling on the lenses and obscuring or distorting the images. In many instances these cameras are mounted at heights and locations intended to maximize the coverage of the cameras, but are not easily accessible in a safe manner, particularly not in winter conditions. Cameras have, for example, been mounted on gantries over road lanes, poles or posts at the side of the road, and on the rooftops or sides of buildings. Conventionally, cleaning is done manually at considerable expense and, in the instance of over-the-road gantries, often requires one or more lanes of traffic to be shut down. If the cameras in the system cannot be cleaned in a timely fashion, considerable revenue can be lost and the ability to enforce traffic laws may be compromised. Further, where cameras are used to recognize the numbers on the license plates of passing vehicles, the optical character recognition (OCR) software will reject more and more images as unreadable as the camera images degrade, requiring more and more manual review.